Digital TV tuner lowers cost of DVB-T, DTMB TV and STB designs

MaxLinear Inc. has started to sample the MxL608, a high-performance digital television tuner that is optimized for cost-sensitive DVB-T and DTMB applications.

The MxL608 is part of MaxLinear’s MxL600 “super radio” family of 4 mm x 4 mm, 65nm pure digital CMOS tuners with high tuning sensitivity, and is well-suited for digital converter set-top boxes (STB), digital-television sets and free-to-air STBs.

The device is pin- and software-compatible with MaxLinear’s MxL603 tuner, which is in high-volume production. Designs based on the MxL608 do not require any balun, thereby significantly reducing board space and lowering overall bill of material (BOM) cost. The MxL608 also offers best-in-class rejection of out-of-band interference from 4G/LTE, WiFi, MoCA and EoC signals, without the cost, space and design complexity of external filters.

Technical Highlights

The MxL608 features an integrated RF loop-through, an accurate input power detector and was specifically designed to exceed the requirements of DVB-T and DTMB terrestrial broadcast standards.

The MxL608 delivers best-in-class typical noise figure of 4.2 decibels (dB). The device also includes MaxLinear’s blocker immunity technology for advanced filtering of strong signals from adjacent channels. The superior phase noise performance provides assurance to set-top box manufacturers that current products will meet future tuner specifications as they evolve.

Additionally, the MxL608 provides extremely low power consumption of approximately 400 milliwatts (mW). The low power consumption and high level of integration enable low-cost, two-layer tuner-on-board implementations as well as ultra-small tuner modules without the need for expensive heat sinks or four-layer PCBs.